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Comment by fidotron

2 days ago

It's actually incredible the extent to which non devs imposing KPIs on devs underestimate how badly this will get gamed, whether it's AIs, PR/line counting or whatever.

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fidotron

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darth_avocado  2 days ago

Gaming is one thing, fundamentally not understanding how engineering works will lead to shittier outcomes and cost the company in ways the management will never understand.

Management in the age of AI is falling for the doorman fallacy wrt engineering. If lines of code were the most valuable aspect of software engineering, my front end JavaScript intern would’ve been the most valuable person in the company. https://www.jaakkoj.com/concepts/doorman-fallacy

  • hnthrow0287345  2 days ago

    >Gaming is one thing, fundamentally not understanding how engineering works will lead to shittier outcomes and cost the company in ways the management will never understand.

    That means nothing to them: they jump ship and find another job just like devs do. The whole industry has been musical chairs for a while.

joshuastuden  2 days ago

Exactly. At Cerebras I know of several people who burn tokens on completely USELESS tasks (randomly changing pixels in an image) just to keep them high up on the token leaderboard.

I suspect the other tokenboard leaders are doing the same. They made the metric "token usage" (which is just a proxy for LOC) so that's what they're gonna get.

ambicapter  2 days ago

Someone at my job uses AI tools to reformat his code...

  • i_love_retros  2 days ago

    My coworker said he does that too. Also have coworkers using AI to run git commands. Nothing fancy either- just pull, push, merge etc

    • fragmede  2 days ago

      When Claude says "Shall I push it", it's way easier to just respond "yes" than it is to open a new terminal and run git push, and if you're being graded on how much AI tokens you use, saying yes looks even better for your metrics!

    • phainopepla2  2 days ago

      Do you mean they tell an LLM "push this code", or that the LLM runs the commands as part of a larger agentic workflow. The former is crazy but the latter makes sense.

      1 reply →

  • SatvikBeri  2 days ago

    I actually do this, but that's mostly because our team reviewed all the existing autoformatters for the relatively obscure language we use, and either really hated the formatting or found that they actually introduced errors!

jimbokun  2 days ago

I think PRs is pretty good, IF

1. you sample a few to see that they are actually meaningful,

2. they go to prod and are validated without having to roll back.

Still needs to be managed. But it should be much easier for a manager to catch an engineer gaming PRs than something like AI use or lines of code.